How to Navigate the Interface

To move between State of the Union addresses, click
or drag on the graph below the word cloud; the president who
delivered each address and the date of delivery will appear at the
bottom of the screen and in the center. The current date will appear
in white and the previous one in red.

You can also use the right and left arrow keys to
move one year at a time.

The words from the previous address viewed will
appear in red when your
mouse is over the cloud window so you can compare them. Mouse out to
make them fade into the background.

Click on a word to view the full State of the Union address in the window to the
right; the selected word will be highlighted.

Click below the graph or on a blank area of the
word cloud to view the Wikipedia U.S. History Timeline describing
events that happened in and around the year of the address.

Words automagically move to avoid overlapping. On mouseover, a line
and dot indicate the original position (according to the data). To make
the words move more, press the up arrow.

Use the search box to mine all the State of the Union
addresses for occurrences of specific words (use quotes to search for
phrases such as “United States”).

Icons below the Timeline indicate the distribution of the address:

Spoken: the
text was delivered orally. Written: the
text was delivered as a written document. Day: the
text was broadcast durring the day. Night: the
text was broadcast in the evening.Radio: the
text was broadcast live on the radio. TV: the
text was broadcast live on television. Web: the
text was distributed on the internet.

Mouse over individual words to get more data on
the word:

Frequency in text

the number of times the word appears in this address.

Per 10k in text

at the current frequency, how many times the word would occur per
ten thousand words.

Per 10k in corpus

at the average frequency of the word in all addresses, how many times
the word would occur per ten thousand words.

Document frequency

the number of documents that the word appears in (out of 227 as of
2013).

Relative frequency

is a measure of how unique the usage of the word is on a scale of
100; if one president uses a word often, that other presidents do not
use so often, it is likely to be important.

Average position

if 0 is the first word and 100 the last; low numbers mean the word
tends to come at the beginning, high numbers the end (numbers near
50 could mean the middle or even distribution).